Drag me into the 21st century please, or, How to get music from hard disc to my ears via existing amp

[Tooslow]

Hi all, please excuse my ignorance but I'm looking for help on some questions;

I have a fair bit of music on my pc, recorded from all sorts of sources, including vinyl where I've either been too tight to buy the CD (joke!) or it just isn't available on CD. It's organised in WMP so it's in album / track order with sleeve art. As I've gone from pc to pc and WMP version to later versions it's been a fight to maintain the "catalog" which describes the music as M'Soft don't provide any sort of export /import facility. I'd like to "set it free" and make it accessible to my hifi - Cyrus CD8 & 8 amp with Dynaudio Audience 42 speakers.I'd also like to add my CD collection to it so that it is all in one place.

"Set it free" means put it on a disk and attach the disk to the back of a "device". I don't want to have to turn on a pc to listen to music. NAS and server would be second choice but an acceptable compromise. Then attach the "device" to the Cyrus amp and use the device remote to select & play music.

Q1. Is that what Squeezebox & Sonos do? Sorry but I'm finding their web pages to be rather "marketing led". Lot's of pretty pictures, graphics etc and not a lot of meat, especially the Logitech site.

Q2 If I rip my CDs to disc am I going to lose the sort of quallty I'm used to from the Cyrus CD player?

Q3 Where do you get high quality digital music from? I know Linn sell this but, well, have you looked at what they have on offer? It's not exactly Dire Straits. :-(

Q4 Would I be better off handing my music over to iTunes rather than letting WMP manage it? Does iTunes allow easy migration of your music collection from pc to pc?

Phew! I didn't know I had so many questions when I started typing this. An indication of my ignorance I suppose. It seems to be an area where you can spend a lot of money (well that's hifi I guess!). Maybe it's not mature and I should wait? I definitely need to buy next month's WHF and read the NAS article.

Thanks,

John

 

[Gerrardasnails]

Tooslow:
Hi all, please excuse my ignorance but I'm looking for help on some questions;

I have a fair bit of music on my pc, recorded from all sorts of sources, including vinyl where I've either been too tight to buy the CD (joke!) or it just isn't available on CD. It's organised in WMP so it's in album / track order with sleeve art. As I've gone from pc to pc and WMP version to later versions it's been a fight to maintain the "catalog" which describes the music as M'Soft don't provide any sort of export /import facility. I'd like to "set it free" and make it accessible to my hifi - Cyrus CD8 & 8 amp with Dynaudio Audience 42 speakers.I'd also like to add my CD collection to it so that it is all in one place.

"Set it free" means put it on a disk and attach the disk to the back of a "device". I don't want to have to turn on a pc to listen to music. NAS and server would be second choice but an acceptable compromise. Then attach the "device" to the Cyrus amp and use the device remote to select & play music.

Q1. Is that what Squeezebox & Sonos do? Sorry but I'm finding their web pages to be rather "marketing led". Lot's of pretty pictures, graphics etc and not a lot of meat, especially the Logitech site.

Q2 If I rip my CDs to disc am I going to lose the sort of quallty I'm used to from the Cyrus CD player?

Q3 Where do you get high quality digital music from? I know Linn sell this but, well, have you looked at what they have on offer? It's not exactly Dire Straits. :-(

Q4 Would I be better off handing my music over to iTunes rather than letting WMP manage it? Does iTunes allow easy migration of your music collection from pc to pc?

Phew! I didn't know I had so many questions when I started typing this. An indication of my ignorance I suppose. It seems to be an area where you can spend a lot of money (well that's hifi I guess!). Maybe it's not mature and I should wait? I definitely need to buy next month's WHF and read the NAS article.

Thanks,

John

One option which I know works is the Western Digital Live box. It's only £90 or so and you need to connect it to a screen (hdmi preferably) to see your library and an external DAC (the internal one is rubbish) using coaxial. You then connect it to your external hard drive. You can also stream to your pc as you updates your library.

 

[PJPro]

Take a look at my WDTV Live thread here.

 

[Craig M.]

q,1. yes. some of the sonos players have a built in amp - not sure if they do one without. i think the nas needs to be able to run server software, although i could be wrong here. i think both do one with a screen built into the remote.

q,2. assuming lossless rips and "bit perfect" output, then it depends on the dac. a dacmagic would get very close, as would a beresford, some would say either option would better your cdp.

q,3. i don't know where you would get lossless rips of mainstream music to download. all my music was ripped from cd.

q,4. no idea, i think there are issues with itunes on pc rather then a mac.

 

[Anonymous]

From what I read you're looking for ease of use, as are most people - which is not surprising. Short of a few awkward methods (such as the one I use) you're pretty much limited to Sonos for a fantastic but expensive service.

I can't believe things haven't become cheaper in this regard, we could write the software to do this in a week.

 

[Tooslow]

Thanks all. I guess I need to give more thought to what I'm trying to do. If I want to be able to download new music then I need to work out how I get it to my disk and that's where NAS may come in. If I want to stream, say, Spotify, then I need a live web connection, so a router connection is needed. Yes I know I didn't mention that. I'm a bit all over the place so thanks for the pointers.

JH

 

[John Duncan]

Octopo:we could write the software to do this in a week.

Send me your CV.

 

[amcluesent]

>"Set it free" means put it on a disk and attach the disk to the back of a "device". <

Squeezebox Touch should be available within a few months. You can start off by using it as a music player just taking music off a USB attached disk, then migrate to a full NAS in due course.